July 13, 2010 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Off-color jokes, unwanted advances, and other forms of sexual harassment are not the only hazards fund raisers can face on the job.
One fund raiser who spoke with The Chronicle on the condition that her name be withheld says that she was raped in 2008 in the course of completing a deal for a $1-million corporate gift for a health charity.
After traveling to the company’s headquarters and signing the gift agreement with several executives, all of whom she had met previously, the fund raiser says she agreed to have dinner with the group, and they offered to pick her up at her hotel later. But when the appointed hour came, she says, only one executive showed up and said his colleagues could not make it.
“Yes, I did think for two minutes, Should I get into the car?” she recalls. “But his company had just signed up for $1-million, he knew I was married, and he had even met my kids at a past event. I told myself I was overreacting and got into the car.”
The fund raiser says she remembers going to the restaurant where she ordered a soft drink, because “I never drink at business dinners,” but the rest of the evening was a blur.
Her next clear memory, she says, was waking up the following morning in her hotel room feeling that something untoward had occurred but unsure of exactly what. It was only over the next six weeks, she says, as fragments of the evening came back to her in bits and pieces, that she came to the conclusion that she had been drugged and raped.
The fund raiser’s flashbacks and her sense that she had been partially incapacitated and taken someplace after dinner—is a “textbook” description of how victims experience a drug-induced date rape and its aftermath, says Lu Torres, executive director of the Rape Crisis Center in Las Vegas.
‘I Thought I Was Safe’
The two years since that evening have been harrowing, the fund raiser says. After concluding she was raped, she says she considered going to the police. She says she agonized over the glare of public scrutiny and the stress that she and her family would endure if she pressed charges or spoke publicly about what happened. And she worried about the fate of the corporate donation.
“I just didn’t want it to affect my life,” she says. “I just wanted to forget it ever happened.”
She left her job, and decided not to tell anyone what had happened, but still could not shake her concerns. After a year, the fund raiser says, she told her husband about what had happened. During the preceding months, he told her, he had noticed a big change in her behavior, including how fearful she was to be alone and what she describes as her “manic” need to be constantly busy. She says her husband still cannot understand why she kept quiet and why she does not want to prosecute, and they have since separated. And even though she spent several months seeing a therapist to cope with the trauma and has made progress—including working as a fund raiser again after a year off—she says she still has symptoms related to the assault.
The fund raiser says she decided to share her experience because she wants other development officers to be alert and use caution, particularly when they are alone with donors, trustees, and other charity supporters.
“I thought I was safe because he knew I was married,” she says of the man she believes abused her. “I know self-defense. I was not drinking. I felt a false sense of security thinking that if he is giving money, he must be good.”
